Yuan Lu, ScD

Dr. Lu was trained in epidemiology and global health, with a particular focus on cardiovascular diseases. She obtained both of her ScD and MSc Degrees in Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health. She works in the intersection of cardiovascular disease prevention, health equity, and digital health, using implementation science methods to resolve real-world issues. Her long-term goal is to improve care, outcomes, and equity of cardiovascular diseases by designing and implementing technology-based interventions.

She successfully completed an NHLBI K12 career development award in implementation science. During this award, she harnessed electronic health records from the Yale New Haven Health System to identify patients with persistent hypertension and designing decision support systems to improve their care. Currently, Dr. Lu serves as the Principal Investigator for an NIH R01 grant, where she leverages real-world data from five electronic health record databases encompassing over 100 million US adults. The goal of this endeavor is to generate real-world evidence that informs decisions regarding hypertension treatment escalation.

In addition to her domestic contributions, Dr. Lu has engaged in groundbreaking collaborative projects between Yale University and the Chinese National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in Beijing. These include the Millions Persons Project that assembles remarkable population health and biomedical resources from 5 million individuals across China. Moreover, she has collaborated with the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) on global analyses examining the impact of risk factors on the worldwide burden of cardiovascular diseases.

She has authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications, including first author articles in leading journals such as The Lancet, JAMA, BMJ, Circulation, and JACC, and her work has been cited more than 50,000 times. Dr. Lu is the recipient of the 2022 John H. Laragh Research Award of the American Journal of Hypertension for her contribution to the field of hypertension. She is a Fellow of the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and currently serves as an Executive Associate Editor at JACC.